Fast Deployment of App to Android Emulator Always Fails

Question

I am attempting to Use Fast Deployment to quickly test my Android App in the emulator. I am doing this because, as you probably know, building and testing an app on the emulator is incredibly slow and quite frustrating so I need to speed this up.

PS: If you have any advice on how you can deploy and run an app on an emulator in under 30 seconds I'd greatly appreciate it. My app is tiny and simple so it shouldn't take bloody 1.5 mins to run on the emulator?

The deployment is failing and giving me the error:

Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploymentException:
FastDevDirectoryCreationFailed at
Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.WaitForRemoteDirCreation(String
destinationPath, CancellationToken token) at
Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.InstallAssemblies(String
destinationPath, CancellationToken token) at
Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.FastDev(Boolean useExternal)
at Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.Run(CancellationToken
token) at
Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.RunLogged(CancellationToken
token) at
Xamarin.AndroidTools.AndroidDeploySession.Start(CancellationToken
token)

How I can fix this error? And successfully Use Fast Deployment and deploy it to the emulator? How you speed up Android emulator deployment and testing?

Relevant information:

• On Windows 8.1 Surface Pro 2 (4gb ram)
• Using VS2013 Professional
• The Android emulator is a Nexus (API 21) CPU = Intel ATOM x86. I am using this because Xamarin suggests this to speed up deployment.
• The project uses Xamarin and MVVM Cross

If I deploy to a different emulator using Use Fast Deployment I get no deployment error but when the app runs it crashes immediately with: Unfortunately 'app' has stopped

Answer 1

Though I don't know what fast deployment is, I can however suggest a very fast emulator - Genymotion. I use it for my app and it deploys in under 10 seconds. Below is the link. https://www.genymotion.com/